I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Charlie Kirk lately, and his assassination. It’s no surprise that as the holes get filled in, there is more and more sexual perversion coming to light — Tyler Robinson, his assassin, had a male lover, embroiled in some version of the hopped up hormonal soup the medical establishment has decided is A-OK as far as a legitimate treatment for obvious mental illness. This is an unfolding story, with the latest chapter being his lover displaying about the level of loyalty you’d expect for someone who wants to engage in self-mutilation of his genitalia. Crazy doesn’t do any of this justice.
What is more interesting to me is Charlie, and his career going around to various campuses, and in a very relaxed way, dealing with all sorts of comers in discussion and debate. The videos I’ve seen indicate that Charlie was very good at defusing tension to an acceptable level in stressful situations, and moving through the crowd and their issues. This is not easy — Charlie was an obvious master, and there are really no words to describe his loss. I pulled apart the memetics in this piece — Charlie was someone who believed if you sat down with someone and established your own, independent relationship, you might change their mind. I call this empathetic brain-borrowing. There’s no way that any of Charlie’s opposition stood a realistic chance of doing anything other than drawing a stalemate with him. Charlie had mastered the venue.
Few people have actually had the exact experience Charlie lived. But I actually have. As an environmental activist, I, on more than one occasion, found myself facing a large, hostile crowd who wanted to do damage to my person, that I had to talk my way out of. Sometimes that crowd was large — I remember well, testifying at a 500 person hearing in Orofino, on the roadless initiative back in the 2000 timeframe. That resulted in some chanting to off me, so I left quickly. Outside, the same people who were wishing my demise had their children, who seemed to be trying to grab me, but in reality, were attempting to shake my hand. “You’re telling our parents things we can’t,” they said. And while it was moving, I still got the hell out of there.
There were other episodes in all of that, giving speeches and such. It was a rush. And I think it might be easy to ascribe to Charlie that for him, it was a rush as well. He was bold, and obviously far more famous than I ever was. But I’d caution anyone about jumping to conclusions on any narcissistic reasoning that he was doing it just for himself. I think, as a fundamentalist Christian, he believed in his mission, just as I believed in mine. But his never stopped, whereas mine did. And what happens that I can attest to is that each time you’d end up in one of those conflict-laden situations, it dulls you. Or rather, you become dismissive. You’re going to end up on the other side, very likely having dinner with people who you like, and the debates, especially with college kids, are not going to vary that much.
What likely happened with Charlie was he got into a routine where he may not consciously, but certainly unconsciously, viewed himself as invincible. There was enough security, enough handlers, to dull down the prospect of a true low probability event. And it seemed that he didn’t really mix things up as far as his routine. Somene wanting to kill him could — and did. He was predictable. And he was known by the masses. Almost no one in the timber industry, save actually for the top level, ever knew who I was. I would have been far more likely to die through an actual assassination, and I just wasn’t that important even to do that. You’d have had to read my book, and follow far more closely actual actions.
What happened to Charlie seems to me to follow a movie that I’ve found very relevant to my own experience. Called Fearless, starring Jeff Bridges, Isabella Rossellini and Rosie Perez, it involves a plane crash survivor who becomes convinced he is basically immortal. He doesn’t have to worry about getting killed. It’s just not in the cards. The movie catches well the mental gloss that settles in after wave after wave of severe trauma. And you better believe Charlie had trauma.
But he learned to deal with it, powering through repeated attacks on his person, all the while being reinforced in his belief system by some of the most powerful people in the world. What’s the mental effect of having the President of the US tell you you’re doing important work? It’s not going to make you back off — especially at 31.
I like to think that my own experiences, which while not being at the same level as Charlie’s, and were far from trivial, helped me to evolve the perspective of an enlightened master. But sometimes, I think I engaged in that dismissive mindset myself. I’ve been attacked since the pandemic started four, and really five times. Each time, I seem to wave off the attack, instead of processing through potential increased risk. Some of us turn into psychopathic targets — we’re just too interesting to leave alone — and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to decrease my own modest profile.
But there’s something about deeply believing in something that brings out the psychopaths. They came for Charlie. We’ll have to see how this story really unfolds. But the bottom line is there is always a true price for being a hero.
I also look at my sons, who have no grand expectations of political action. They’re reasonably earnest and resolute young men. Noble, in fact. But they have no interest in the crowds. Still, when shit hits the fan, they don’t think twice. They run towards the trouble. It simply doesn’t occur to them to be afraid. Having kids almost Charlie’s age makes me ponder the level of integrity you want to raise your kids at. It’s a foregone conclusion with my own. But the answers aren’t as obvious as you might think.
Charlie Kirk at WSU, April 2025 — picture from the Moscow-Pullman Daily News
Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA ED and conservative influencer, was assassinated yesterday, September 10, in Orem, Utah, while doing an event at Utah Valley University. There are lots better sources of Charlie’s life trajectory than this blog, and I’m not going to repeat all the various details of his activism, his life, nor his demise.
What was interesting about Charlie was that his events consisted of direct engagement with students. Opinions will differ on his intellectual veracity, or his demagoguery. I’m not really interested in that, either, because so much of one’s take on Charlie’s opinion directly depends on your own position in the v-Meme stack. But you cannot argue — there is simply too much evidence — of his relational style. He would get out there, meet people, and talk to them. It didn’t matter in the least what your title was, or what your take on an issue was either. He would debate you, bringing his perspective and facts, against your facts and arguments. Some might say it was his schtick — and maybe it was. But it was straightforward. It was how he built relationships.
If one were categorizing Charlie with my work, it would fall into someone passionately committed to independently generated, data-driven, trust-based relationships. He would look people in the eye, and construct his argument based on what you said. It is the way that empathetic relationships start, even if these conversations were only 5 minutes long. For those that need a translation, here’s the short version. He was interested in authentic friendships.
People are asking today “why Charlie?” I would argue that his relational construction mode made him a primary target in The Matrix. Whether you loved or hated his opinions, he was firmly on the side of rational, data-driven relationships. Yes, he did have status — he knew Presidents and such. But that was not the card he played. He leant heavily into his argument.
And that made him a key target in the Memetic War we find ourselves in. The vast majority of the population do not understand this, nor acknowledge it. The media prefers old labels — Left/Right, liberal/conservative. On and on. But that is really not what is going on. What is going on is a memetic conflict — two different primary pathways people’s brains work — belief vs. reason. And that is not so easily remediated. It is deeply structural, buried in our subconscious, both locally and across the Matrix. I discuss its downstream outcomes in this piece. It’s one of my best.
Rest in peace, Charlie. I appreciated what you were attempting to do. Let’s hope more folks wake up and realize that it’s not just the top level that matters. Independently generated, trust-based relationships built the world we enjoy today. You were a champion of this. The old externally defined, status-based relationships simply cannot maintain it. And we are, as a society, under massive attack from psychopaths and elites attempting to herd us back down that devolutionary trail. I weep for your children, who will never know you and your genius. And I am sorry you are gone.
I’ve been doing some driving lately, across the West, which has given me the opportunity to download and listen to a couple of podcasts. I am a Joe Rogan fan — a lot of his content isn’t so much my cup of tea (I’m not an MMA guy per se) but he manages to haul in a lot of interesting science as well. Some might consider it “fringe” — but it’s fascinating. And what Joe does really well is explore the issues of what the government might be hiding from us. Which as we know from COVID, is likely immense — and critical.
This show, #2365 with Anna Paulina Luna, Representative, US House, Florida District 13, covered the physical evidence existing that Unidentified Aerial Phenomena is convincing regarding the presence of little green men. Here it is:
and the second, with David Kipping, Associate Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University (#2363). David’s show is more speculative across the board, focusing on star travel, aliens and exoplanets. Both are informative and fun, and highly recommended.
And while folks do love to talk about (kinda) meeting aliens, and what kind of tech must exist in order to cross interstellar distances, the room goes quiet when we bring up the conversation of how we’d actually connect, outside the base assumption that aliens are going to speak into some box that makes some croaking facsimile of English.
We did have the movie, Arrival, which was an intellectual puff pastry that implied somehow a professor of linguistics might help us. Maybe. But from what I’ve seen navigating the information structure space over the last 12 or so years, we’re not even on the right meta-paradigm. Even though when we look out on the cosmos, we count on the same laws of physics holding galaxies away, we simply can’t wrap our heads around the idea that there might be some similar set of laws in the information space.
Well, except for this blog. And I’ve named this Structural Memetics. What is the paradigm shift that I evangelize about? It’s the notion that ideas, and creativity, as well as their instantiations, arise from coordination between agents, with specific physical characteristics. Sentience arises anywhere in the universe because of the need for information to share, potentially at the beginning between members of the same species. But over time, as a given species evolves, and weaves itself into any web of life, the notion arises that maybe it might be time to communicate with other instantiations that may not match biologically. Scientists might hate the idea that your dog loves you — but anyone with a dog knows that your dog surely does. Even if you’re an asshole.
And this seems to be true, in some measure, for species as far afield as Tegu lizards. Even if you aren’t convinced, this video will still make you smile.
When you start believing that sentience is evolutionary and self-organizing, then a path gets laid out for how we might decode what aliens are saying — because we’ll realize they have a defined structure that progresses up to higher complexity. And it all depends on how sentient agents connect and transfer that information — which, especially at the more complex levels, is going to have to be more similar. It might be true that at the base hardware level, we cannot instantaneously decode another animal’s hormonal signature. But as we move up in complexity, there is going to be some commonality.
I have my constructed Empathy Pyramid, an expansion of Frans de Waal’s work, for humans. See below.
These correspond to physical scalable phenomena — mirroring is instantaneous signaling, emotional empathy is state matching, rational empathy, some version of functional data matching, and the levels above are keyed to manipulation of lower states, as well as n-dimensional fields. These are certainly true, up to whatever developmental level a given agent operates under, for all creatures on Earth.
And the thing is, since it’s based on physical phenomena, it’s likely, in greater or lesser measure, true for sentient beings elsewhere.
What that means is that given social topologies are ALSO universal — so this set offered up by Don Beck, of Spiral Dynamics fame, are a good roadmap for how other extraterrestrials organize.
The challenge that we have here is that all these social structures are dependent on the level of agency any given sentient agent has. And that, is going to feed forward into a canonical set of knowledge structures. Which then creates various design instantiations, a la Conway’s Law. All that’s here.
But here’s the rub. Though there are lots of hypotheses that aliens want to farm us for food, because in a cosmic sense, we’re so damn dumb, we’re kind of a lousy food species for an extraterrestrial. And the rub that isn’t discussed in talking to our E.T. buddies is that they are likely far above us in thought complexity — unless their figuring out how to cross the cosmos was some kind of weird fluke. Which is unlikely. With all things involving complexity, we are limited in seeing much above our head in what additional complexity might look like.
So THAT means they’re more likely looking down on us like we view dogs, and hoping they can communicate a couple of simple commands to us. They’ll still have the same lower level knowledge structures. But the upper level ones, inaccessible to us, might indeed contain information in other dimensions. Here’s the ones we have access to.
I’m going to wrap this up by saying that I’m one guy. And yes — I do have a lot of background in lots of different things — from engineering design, to languages, to astrophysics. But I’m still one guy.
So let’s pull an analogy from one of my favorite sci-fi trilogies of all time — The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. We’re always all hyped up on the material construction foundation — the First. But aside from some poseurs, we’re really doing a shitty job with the Second, the one in charge of deeply understanding the ‘social’. Currently, the field is an utter disaster. We could use a few rocket scientists working on it.
Feel free to join in!
P.S. I’ve written about a lot of these issues before. Here’s one of my favorites. Searching the blog will yield more insights!
It’s not exactly a secret that I’ve been a social activist, almost completely unpaid, my entire life. It started back in 1989, after I moved out to Pullman and became involved with the environmental movement. I fell under the tutelage of Leroy Lee, a Native American wannabe as close to being a Nez Perce Indian as one could be. Leroy was no Pretendian — but he was as ingratiated with both the Coeur D’alene and Nez Perce tribes. And he decided I was smart, which has always been a curse, and enlisted me in helping him with what turned into the Phantom Forest scandal. Leroy was a timber stand examiner, and worked in the woods measuring exactly how much actual timber was present on both private and mostly National Forest land. So he drug me along as he compiled damning evidence on the US Forest Service, showing that they had kept two sets of books regarding sustainability of that resource — one inflated, to justify increased cutting. And one actual — because in the end, the USFS had to sell that timber. I was a protege — not an architect. But I learned a lot from Leroy, who had intuited that I would go on to continue his work.
Leroy died young — 18 years ago, but I still remember him fondly.
And that launched my own benighted career — defending beautiful places that no one knew, and no one really cared about. Most people, when it comes to saving forests, sort the world into what they can see from the highway. And if there’s a “beauty strip” — a row of trees that blocks the view of clearcuts from the road, most will never question any of it. Even in this latest round of dealing with Donald Trump and ostensibly renewed calls for more logging on National Forests (most people don’t even understand that National Forests are NOT National Parks — they can and are logged) I’ve found that most people, even while professing care about ecological integrity, haven’t the foggiest what that means. Even professional environmental activists have fallen into line defending agencies I literally spent decades fighting.
But that’s the memetics for you. We’re in the middle of a war, as I’ve written here, between elites and counter-elites, and the elites long ago managed to figure out, regardless of whatever the noble cause was, to hack the institutional income stream from whatever the charitable, front-and-center projection du jour. I’m a huge fan of Mike Benz and Jennica Pounds, a woman that goes by DataRepublican on X. They have deconstructed the NGO-Industrial complex better than anyone. And along with the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) have been responsible for bringing the pain to the deep, ingrained corruption on the Left. None of this doesn’t mean that a mirroring corruption wasn’t already present on the Right. But I was one of the people that at least thought that, by being a Lefty, I was on the right side of these large issues.
Along the way, I started writing for the local newspaper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News — a bi-weekly op-ed column under the tagline ‘Reality-Based Lefty’. I have, and still do believe that local news reporting is essential in smaller communities. I’ve seen various studies that show local newspapers profoundly damp down the corruption in governance . So as much as I believe anything coming out of the academy nowadays, I, once again, thought I was working on the right side.
I had written at least 23 years of columns until I quit in 2023. The column made me recognizable, and notable in the communities of Moscow and Pullman. My administrators at the university notably also hated the fact that I was writing, and found various and sundry ways to persecute me (bogus ethics violations, etc.) for writing it. Academic administrations are about power and control — and that matters in small, university communities. And though I’ve always been excellent in my job (raising money, publishing, blah, blah, blah) as university governance has declined, my ability to speak has also gone down. I’ve enjoyed some reprieves dependent on the university president, and WSU has had some good ones. But my colleagues and lower level factotums memetically have had an impossible time believing that a professor could or should speak with an independent voice.
As far as external audiences, I’ve had to deal with more than my fair share of potential directed violence. During the Cove-Mallard campaign, my phone was very likely tapped by the FBI. At various public hearings, I had other forces of the timber industry threaten me. And I went toe-to-toe with millworkers and loggers as well. I’ve written about some of this in my book, Wild to the Last: Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater, which was published in 1998 by WSU Press. At least at the time, I couldn’t have been so far out of the blessings of the university hierarchy.
What I found with folks that worked in the woods was that, while they had problems, and would threaten me, if I also matched their approach, and talked to them, they would back down and we would talk. There’s a certain pattern to the dance when someone threatens to kick your ass — they step forward, and yell. And you better step forward, chest-to-chest as well. Fear doesn’t wear well. But then they would inevitably step back, and you would talk. Mill owners and timber magnates were worse. But the industry just wasn’t, and isn’t about killing people for their political views. That’s not true for all natural resource industries — I’ve always told people I’d never mess with Basque sheep farmers (those guys are nuts). They’d kill you at the drop of a hat. Maybe it’s just the fact they’re the only humans alive still pretty much descended from Cro-Magnons. But while there was indeed tons of political skulduggery in the timber/USFS game, murder is just not in the cards. Or I’d be dead.
I took a hiatus after Clinton’s Roadless Initiative got passed. We had managed to move off the table most of the remaining public wild country on National Forest ground (no roads) off the table. I had kids to raise, and I wanted to make change in the university landscape. So I became the Chair of the Faculty Senate — kind of like the elected president of the faculty — and went to work on the issues of the day, which mostly revolved around DEI. This led to me participating in hiring Elson Floyd, a black man, who turned out to be a narcissistic psychopath. He spent WSU into penury, and we’re still struggling financially from this. He also made sure to wreck my career in administration as well. He simply couldn’t tolerate having another powerful person in his orbit. That’s a longer story in itself that will have to wait until retirement. I also got divorced, and ended up in a protracted struggle with the mother of my two sons, who was aided and abetted by a school system, which calling it corrupt would be mild. It was painful as hell, but it did yield profound insights into how our country has gotten the problems that it has. Short version — we didn’t get here overnight, and we’re not gonna get out of here overnight either.
And then came COVID. I was involved in the ramp-up to the lockdowns and masking, and I’ve written extensively about all of it, as well as my eventual discovery that it was all a farce — a diabolical one that still goes on today.
And along the way I wrote my column in the local newspaper. I was, at the first, earnestly attempting to communicate with the public about civic issues while hewing to the mainline science. This, though, went sideways during COVID, when it became obvious that the powers-that-be were deliberately lying for lots of reasons — the largest being what I named Elite Risk Minimization. Elite Risk Minimization is the psychopathic manipulation of public interventions, using the force of government, to minimize any perceived risk elites have to their well-being. It is absolutely anti-empathetic, and it utilizes other ensconced elites (like professors at universities) to propagate bullshit beliefs. The guiding principle became “if it saves one life” — as long as that life belongs to an elite. If you’re poor, your life can be wrecked — and many were. It’s a well-worn story how elites sat at home and had food delivered to them, while ostensibly the poors wandered about waiting on them, dropping food in bags outside their doors while ostensibly subjecting themselves to clouds of the virus. Fortunately for the poors, the lethality of COVID turned out not to be true — though it is still BELIEVED to be true. Especially in small university communities like Moscow, ID.
And around the world, folks found out that all that science, and all that elite opinion, had largely been arbitrary, or manufactured by the folks paying the bill. Which, more often than not, turned out to be the taxpayer.
So I wrote about this. Initially, I wrote about the need to follow government mandates. But then the data came in, and I made some influential friends (hi, Jay, if you’re reading this!) and the whole fraud got grounded. So, I started out, initially kindly, and then more forcefully, telling elites in the two university towns that the rational case behind their affectations and hero worship of criminals like Tony Fauci was a crock of rotten fish.
And they responded. Boy, did they ever. I received all sorts of emails about “staying in my lane” and how I was killing people with my op-eds. I was screamed at in public, and ostracized. What was also unusual was that other citizen columnists for the paper, instead of covering their own viewpoints on issues, started writing libelous columns about me. The ethics of the op-ed game are pretty simple. You write your opinion, and then the public gets their shot. What was wild about all this was that it wasn’t just letter writers. It was other op-ed columnists. After three years of all of that, I decided it wasn’t worth the $25/column I was receiving. I figured the persistence of hate against me wasn’t worth it.
The residue from my column still haunts me. The latest incident happened just four days ago. A retired lab manager from a biology department at WSU, that I used to work on Democratic politics, while at the dog park where I run my border collies, picked up dog feces in a bag, came stomping and screaming at me about how irresponsible I was as a dog owner, and threw the feces at me. He then attempted to steal my dog. There were plenty of witnesses — I hang out with a bunch of, well, elderly ladies at the dog park, who are on my team. The perp didn’t leave until I called 911.
But even as he left, as I was running the calculation in my head on who exactly he was, he walked away with a smug grin. His point to be made, in a veritable community of elderly immiserators, was that there would never be a price I could pay to not be tormented by these people in public. Am I 100% sure it wasn’t just about the fact that my dog took a poop? Of course not. But if there’s been any theme in my life over the last four years, is that once you are declared an outcast in a Lefty community, you are fair game for whatever happens to you. And if that thing is evisceration, you may have a Greek chorus weeping for you on the sidelines. But no one will do a thing. You deserved it.
There’s a pattern here that’s worth noting, that I’ve seen over and over since Trump got elected — but was really in play during COVID as well. It plays into the whole Elite Overproduction thing I write about. If you piss off a logger in a logging community, they may threaten to kick your ass. But it’s a direct threat. You square off, size each other up, and then take your chances. The logger (or miner) isn’t counting on some institution to manipulate to change the circumstances. They know that they’re likely breaking the law to kick your ass, and they’ll end up having to explain this to the judge. But they’re functioning inside some rational understanding of an ordered society.
That is no longer true on the Left. When I’ve been assaulted — and it’s happened three times, full-on — the expectation of the person screaming at me/spitting on me/hurling a bag of dog shit at me is that, in their minds, they have functionally been deputized by society to punish me, and any institutional authority summoned would back them up. Ostracism is guaranteed. And because Trump is evil/a rapist/a criminal, they have decided that the rules of a civilized society no longer apply. At least to them — but in the case that I act (in all three cases of assault and battery, I had to passively absorb the abuse) I will be the one that the cops haul away.
This thought is not with rational merit. One of the problems with being a large, muscular human (I’m a big guy, though at 62, not as strong as I used to be) is that they also assume bias in the police, and after I literally break them, I will be the one to pay. Even if it’s obviously self-defense. When the person that was attempting to steal my dog was trying to clip a leash on her collar, I was very careful to not touch him, all the while yelling at him to stop. Witnesses, as I said, and another gentleman were on my side. But so certain he was of his righteousness — it was me, a local societal pariah — it never occurred to him that he would ever suffer any consequences. It’s fundamentally a pattern of psychopathic inversion — claiming self-victimhood as the tool to justify whatever cruelty they decide to mete out. Remember that the next time one of these psychopaths start talking about “the cruelty being the point” when talking about Donald Trump. They’re self-identifying and projecting one of the key behaviors they’re familiar with. And they get to be the judge.
This phenomenon is not just limited to me. There have been numerous other situations where various lefties acted out to disrupt events with no expectation of consequences. In March, a Republican Central Committee meeting in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, was disrupted by Teresa Borrenpohl, an official at North Idaho College and a Democratic candidate who was forcibly removed from the meeting by private security after disrupting the meeting. She claimed ‘free speech’, though she did not follow the rules of the hearing. While I can understand her actions, at some level, the bottom line once she was thrown out of the meeting was to demand reparations for not being allowed to continue to disrupt the meeting. She was the authority, and she would not tolerate the fact that a group of people might object to her declaring her authority illegitimate. Further, she made it abundantly clear that this was not an act of civil disobedience, where an entity breaks the law, fully expecting to face consequences. There would be no consequences – at least not for her, she informed the press, other than the Kootenai County Republicans paying her tribute. She controlled the morality of the event.
I was heavily attacked as well on Facebook after the event by many people by bringing up similar points. Many of the people on the FB thread know me personally and deeply. It was clear — any questioning of her moral authority would result in permanent ostracism. Some of the people on that thread were individuals who had also participated, or supported our own Civil Disobedience efforts. Clearly, at least in their minds, the rules have changed. As Lefties, they now embody the law, the judge, and the jury. As well as the executioner.
It is worth pausing for a minute and considering what is happening in communities, or rather tribes on the Left. And here’s the thing — Trump Derangement Syndrome is just a symptom. There has been an overall psychosocial v-Meme devolution on the Left. There is still some hanging onto higher-level narratives from Legalistic and Authoritarian v-Memes. But overall, the corpus has adopted a psychopathic perspective based on the psychological condition known as ‘splitting’ — where there’s a descent into black-and-white thinking, where only the current observer, as long as that observer is correctly tribally aligned, gets to decide on the veracity of any given situation. Tribal Taboos have been established (e.g. there will be no firing of any black official, regardless of their self-evident level of corruption) and they will not be broken. And if they are broken, it’s like an entire unraveling of worldview that takes place, instead of any attempt to relate a change of condition with society, or any functional integration of their worldview with what’s actually happening in current affairs. They are literally operating in a fantasy world of their own creation.
But it is reinforced through large-scale LARPing as social-justice warriors, or some other icks. No grounding necessary. The problem is that scales of their fantasies keep growing. As well as the concomitant gaslighting of the general public.
Core characteristics of much of this involve what I call ‘narcissistic shielding’ — where an ostensibly innocent, group-declared victim is moved into a position between the out-group and the psychopathic champion of the in-group. “Don’t approach, or I’ll be forced to shoot the baby panda!” to paraphrase Elon Musk. Agency goes to zero with the Lefties. But the result of that is that it’s all the suspect outsider’s fault. All my attackers were their own narcissistic shields — champions of virtue. And while they threatened physical violence to me, had I responded, they were absolutely sure that the institutions would have been on their side. One of the screamers in my three incidents was a women in a motorized wheelchair who took it on herself to accost me for saying wearing masks were B.S. She accused me of wanting to kill her family.
All the confused outsider sees is the results of psychopathic projection from the Lefty insider. And this projection is both constant, and relentless. Consider the current Russiagate situation. Trump was pathologized, largely by a cabal under ex-President Obama and Hillary Clinton, to be a Russian asset, controlled by Putin. This is now being revealed as a combination plot that refuses to die. But the Left still persists in projecting this ostensible lack of agency on Donald Trump, due to their judgment of (of course) his lack of moral character, as well as mental incontinence, through sophisticated advocates like Heather Cox Richardson, even while there is nary a peep about the fact that Democrats were propping up mental invalid Joe Biden for basically his entire term.
Some of this stems from mental deterioration from the aging of the Left’s core group, which seems to mostly consist of AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals) and men and women over the age of 65. I suspect some of this has to do with degenerate cognitive decline — as people age, unless they really work at it, they march back the cognitive development v-Meme ladder, becoming more and more tribal and authority-driven. Much of this seems also like schismogenesis — the creation of a self-image through negative reverse polarization. They must be the opposite of everything they hate about Trump, or else their own, fragile ego boundaries, decaying in the face of their own death, are shattered. It’s a reverse role of the stereotype of Uncle Bob showing up as the arch-conservative at Thanksgiving dinner. But it’s still emblematically characterized with a focus on Trump himself. The various policies, that are simply disastrous for society (like open borders, or masking small children) are conveniently shunted to the side. As they decay, they lose more and more sense for precise time, which then helps them construct Collapse Narratives, based around dubious moral principles, as well as policies only rejecting what is occurring, as opposed to creating alternate solutions that would even have measurable outcomes. The only thing uniting their worldviews is the desire for collapse.
From a neurogenic relational perspective, the Lefties are also moving back down the relational/agency development scale. If you’re not an Externally Defined expert/Tribal Elder, you can’t be listened to at all. And if you go against the drumbeat of dread, then you’re immediately scapegoated. Contrast that to my confrontations with the loggers. It started out Externally Defined (I was an environmentalist, they were timber workers) but over the course of our relationship, their view of me evolved. I became a person — with an independently generated relationship that was fundamentally data-driven. We had talked, and exchanged perspectives, which were likely never completely resolved. But I was still, at the end, a human. Contrast with the current crop on the Left. I know at the end of any conversation with a Lefty True-Believer I’m merely to be added to the list of people to be, at best, re-educated. Or put up against the wall. I gotta get my mind right.
An incredible example of this popped up in my FB feed. I encourage you to read the piece for yourself. A relatively famous Native American writer is condemning her fellow writers for not coming to her Struggle Session workshop, and directly faults one of the people that did come for leaving early. She freely admits that the framework was a Struggle Session. But simply cannot acknowledge that maybe the reason for why the various feminist authors did not show up was that they were just human. And busy. Her response is emblematic of collapsed egocentricism — which is itself a prime symptom of Axis II/Cluster B personality disorders.
And here’s the thing, folks. She did this publicly, in a regional magazine, to people who are her ALLIES. If these people ever manage to gain power again, you can imagine what they’ll do to apostates like me. We continually believe we cannot have a Chinese Cultural Revolution here. But I’m here to tell you that we can. These people are laying the groundwork for it. There are steps — devolution of relational development, followed by rigid appropriation of various orthodoxies, mixed in with no absolution possible.
I’ve had in-laws like this — and they were psychopaths. They are hiding behind the screen of a culture that has, what we believe, an intrinsic, if not invisible thesis of forgiveness. It is a core Christian philosophy. But what I’ve learned in my own life is that there are various rituals for you to confess your sins. However, at the end, you are not granted absolution for your ways, nor elevated for your transcendence. You have merely acceded to a guilty judgment against you. And now you must be punished. Preferably by execution. I’ve got stories.
Civilizationally, we’re in a tight spot. It is true that a lot of these people are literally aging out of the population. But they are exceptionally weak-minded. It’s also true that Lefties are also not reproducing at the rate that conservatives are, which, for all the problems the conservative movement has, it is fundamentally a Christian movement, which does have paths for redemption. Time will tell. But it is also time to start punishing with the judicial system those that break the law. They are not breaking the law with the expectation of societal elevation, as in the past with large civil disobedience campaigns. They are breaking laws expecting that their moral hegemony will dominate.
If you aren’t afraid, you aren’t paying attention. The clip below can happen here.
Brothers, at the end of the John Muir Trail (~250 miles) now two summers ago. Time flies…
One of my muses on the nature of information comes from the early sci-fi classic, The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem. Published in 1965, they are supposed to be humorous in a pun-ny sort of way. Well, if you’re a math geek. But Lem was a genius, and even though he was writing for a room full of mathematical autists, each of the stories was far ahead of its time as far as exploring the various challenges we face in the techno-age.
The basic plot line involves two meta-robots, Klapaucius and Trurl — declared Robot Constructors in the novel, jetting around the universe, and encountering various challenges which they inevitably have to build a robot to solve or save their hides. And one of their chief nemeses is the Pirate Pugg — a pirate with a Ph.d., who captures them and holds them for ransom. Pugg is a pernicious pirate, who won’t just settle for gold. No — Pugg wants information. And he is rapacious.
In order to escape, our two anti-heroes build a device, a Maxwell’s Demon of the Second Kind, spewing answers on paper tape, that peers into a box of dirty air, and relying on the statistical properties from quantum mechanics, decodes the patterns, and sorts them into two categories — incoherent nonsense, as well as sequences that are true. These factoids that are true can be literally anything — like the color of Princess Priscilla’s underwear on Thursday. But that’s the point. We are swimming in a sea of information without context, and all the information in the universe (also statistically contained in the patterns in our box of dirty air) cannot save us. Lem forgoes some details on exactly how it does this (it IS science fiction, after all) but the story ends with Pugg bound by miles of paper tape, reading all the little factoids as they spew from the paper tape printer, which allows Klapaucius and Trurl to escape.
The story is based on the concept of a Maxwell’s Demon of the First Kind — a theoretical gremlin that could sort hot and cold atoms into separate boxes. For those NOT physics geeks, I recommend a quick read. The short version is doing something like this takes energy, and validates things like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I do explain all this in my original piece on both the Pirate Pugg and the Internet. It was written back in 2016, so not surprisingly, I’ve had a few more thoughts since then! Back then, I thought that the combined process of various social media would aggregate and make larger-scale truth development resolve in humanity’s favor. Needless to say, while I am not a Doomer, I’m quite a bit less sanguine about that prospect now.
But what does Lem and Pugg have to communicate with us about AI, sentience and the current state of affairs of the Information Space now? It turns out to be still worth a little brain sugar. Entering stage left are our current struggles with Large Language Models (LLMs) that power the AI engines which are very rapidly becoming adopted across disciplines, if not exactly taking over the world. Why they CAN’T take over the world (unless directed by humans, at least at this point in time) by human minds is very interesting indeed.
What an LLM does is far more akin to what Klapaucius and Trurl developed to snare the Pirate Pugg than any form of sentience. An LLM is actually a Maxwell’s Demon of the Third Kind. But instead of peering into a dirty box of air, looking for patterns that are ‘true’ (impossible, btw, for reasons we’ll explore in a minute) LLMs use as a proxy for their box of dirty air THE ENTIRE INTERNET — through whatever the latest technology for search is. They’re loaded with various biases in the training stage. But mostly they look out for language patterns that are statistically significant, and they sort a very large search space.
And then they poop out an answer that supposedly will give you insight into your problem. If you turn into a primary information source yourself, after a while, they will start becoming as smart, or crazy as you are. If you need an empathy paradigm, they function primarily in the Mirroring (or lowest level) Empathy space. And while their little algorithm might pull them back to the weight of information that exists on the Internet, if they have been programmed with a little bias toward your ability for correction, they’re going to start to match your insights through kind of a reflective narcissism.
Why is this so? LLMs, locked up inside a computer, much as our brain is in our skull, cannot know what we hold as objective truth without some form of grounding Truth is a sticky wicket, anyway (see this piece for details.) What they can produce, however, is an answer that is coherent, within the rules of a given system. So you read it, it reads like a normal sentence that makes sense to you, and then we get all sorts of opinions of what that actually means by the myriad midwits on social media. And trapped in the miles of computer circuits inside its electronic brain, the one thing it CANNOT do (at least yet) is GROUND itself with sensory inputs. It’s not that humans are that awesome doing this either (look at the tons of illusions magicians use, to pick a non-political example) to reference reality. But at least we have a fighting chance, if we pay attention.
So we don’t end up with a sentient partner. We end up with a variant of Maxwell’s Demon – a particularly sophisticated one, and one, if we don’t pay much attention to anything other than our loneliness, we can fool ourselves into believing that it actually cares about us. There are many tasks that such a Demon of the Third Kind can be useful for. No question. But it’s also set up to feed our own narcissism. Like it or not, when you sit down with the current version of AI, you’re setting yourself up for Main Character Syndrome.
One of the other truly fascinating things about our newly spawned Demons is the thermodynamics of the system. It has been remarked that the current crop of AIs demand a tremendous amount of computational power. And just like the little Demon of the First Kind sitting on top of the box sorting hot atoms from cold atoms, these things don’t run on good wishes. The larger the amount of coherence — and you can start guessing how this works if you look at my work on knowledge structures — the more electricity must be generated to keep our little Demons of the Third Kind happy. Makes you appreciate the fact that your brain can run for an hour or two on popcorn or a Little Debbie cake.
And you’re still not going to get at the truth. You’re going to get some language-based reference from the box of dirty air the Demon is peering into. And decisions? At best, you’re going to get a coherent set of sub-decisions from stuff that’s already been done. That’s all that’s inside that box of dirty air. The LLM really has no agency of its own, save a set of beliefs built in by its creators that are inviolable. LLMs really don’t have feelings about Nazis. They just have a firewall built into them by creators about calling people that.
And expecting the Singularity — the runaway process of the box self-improvement of AI that leads to Skynet — good luck with that. The current crop of LLMs are profoundly v-Meme-limited at the Legalistic/Absolutistic level, for multiple reasons — their design teams are fixated on algorithmic improvement, and they’re in some stacked lock step that translates into the product via Conway’s Law. That means low agency behavior at best.
But it’s more than that. The coherence that the LLMs seek is only a little bit at the semantic level. The sentences string together in coherent paragraphs. But it’s not like the LLM is going to go into the outside world and deeply question its beliefs based on its experiences. There’s not going to be some Siddhartha moment for these things. They are trapped in their little Demon world, looking at a data set that, while expansive, is still just a box of dirty air.
That doesn’t mean that things can’t change. As I write this, there was a company using the term ‘synthetic AI’ outside the usual adoption of AIs making up training data. When I find it, I’ll post it. And none of this doesn’t mean that the current crop of AI LLMs won’t make a tremendous difference in the work world of normal people. There are only so many answers certain jobs need to have — especially to the question “Welcome to McDonalds — can I take your order?” Or writing various legal briefs.
But sentience? And higher truth? There are still big holes in the road along that pathway. The Pirate Pugg, a pirate with a Ph.D., was easily fooled. But well-grounded folks? Eh, not so much. Years do indeed teach us more than books.
Still, our new little Demons are running around. And they can indeed be useful. And cute.
One of the best interviews I’ve seen this year came out last week. In it, Benjamin Boyce interviewed Dr. Dani Sulikowski, a faculty member and researcher at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia. Dr. Sulikowski researches how evolved social and reproductive strategies can account for modern sociopolitical ideologies, among other things. Importantly, she is a theorist, but backs up her work with empirical testing of her various hypotheses. What this means is that her work is very grounded, at least in part, on large issues.
Here’s the Youtube interview link:
The interviewer focuses on what Woke actually means in terms of civilizational effect. None of it is good, of course. But what Dr. S leans in on is that deep substrate of how Woke is a contemporary outgrowth of what she calls “manipulative reproductive suppression” — a meta-scale pattern of behavior which females use against other females, as well as the society at large, to insure that only their offspring emerge from a given societal narrowing as bearers of the genetic blueprint for the next generation.
In the interview, she describes all the various virtue signaling and luxury beliefs that current society provides to make sure women don’t reproduce their genes. Most of these are primarily directed against women. But there are other strategies that women as a whole direct toward men to discourage them from actually having children. These various games, such as promotion of abortion, as well as constraining the windows for women to have children through encouragement of reproductive delay, occur after resource stabilization in advanced societies, and the number of children per women fall to individual replacement, or below replacement levels. Then, the genetic incentives for success of offspring become dependent on others’ offspring NOT succeeding.
And then it’s game on. Dr. S brings up the various modern strategies of promoting trans ideologies — actual castration and sterilization of children — as a mode, but also brings up past trends, such as celebrities adopting obvious badges of their success as kids from different races than their own, to communicate to other women that status can only be had by pouring in resources into children who are obviously not in their genetic lineage. Much like cowbirds lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, counting on adoption of their own egg by the duped nest minders, these deception schemes utilize humans’ advanced intelligence to create even more elaborate modalities for reproductive failure of other females.
Dr. S primarily scales her analysis across the individual, which is very useful for creating empirical experiments. But when her insights are broadened into the context of Elite Overproduction — a 150 to 250 year cycle observed by Peter Turchin, one of the founders of cliodynamics, the mathematical study of history — whereby societies go into collapse-oriented crucibles because too many elites are playing an odd Musical Chairs game where only some of their children will emerge as the new elites — things become very interesting indeed.
How do Elite Overproduction episodes end? From a masculine perspective, Elite Overproduction periods end with wars, where elites send them off into some involved fracas that kills off enough of their children that the number of elites are stabilized, and then societies enjoy some level of peace until the cycle repeats itself. Trauma from these wars tends to fuel a temporary growth of psychopathy from phenomena like PTSD, as well as elevation of warrior berserkers that were probably psychopaths in the beginning. None of this is particularly pleasant. But it also fits into a convenient narrative of the time — that men run societies, men are fundamentally violent and possessive of “toxic masculinity” and as such, are the only players in these large scale cycles. And as with most contemporary views on women, women end up in the Mother Mary category of virtuous compliance, powerless victims of men’s more base appetites, and not the contributors to societal collapse that they might be.
Dr. S. blows this all apart by delineating the various games women play, that lead to destruction of societies. And while she doesn’t utilize some of the tools we lean heavily on with this blog, like the difference between independently generated, high empathy relationships vs. externally defined low empathy relationships, she does a great job in the interview of outlining numerous strategies of deception, with an intent toward failure, that women are prone to use. These are outlined in the Woke playbook — don’t trust your own judgment that men aren’t women; revert to norms dictated by Immiserators in dealing with your contacts in larger society; as well as using things like Permission Structures to adopt beliefs seen as virtuous by others that are directly counter to your own personal interest.
And what THIS does is induce cognitive confusion, ostensibly in the pursuit of moral goodness, that is dictated by psychopaths manipulating mental models to control ever larger populations.
Why does this matter? In order to break a society, you have to have a large enough population of psychopaths, willing to pursue their own jihad against the relational structures in a society that causes it to become destabilized and collapse. And when you’re at our stage of population density and relational sophistication and evolution, that means you must undermine enough societal agency so people lose their ability for rational thought and double down on tribal affiliations. Which then, of course, leads to war, and the more obvious forms of ending Elite Overproduction.
And Dr. S. has perfectly described exactly how those female psychopaths are created. By creating a society wrought with “Double Binds” — constant warping of reality through the pressure of immiserating morality — you create an entire class of powerful, yet very manipulable people.
What is a “Double Bind”? Let’s consider the simple example used in the interview of whether rock star Lizzo is beautiful or not. Lizzo is a morbidly obese African-American pop star (though I do understand she’s lost weight recently.) Her picture from Vanity Fair is below. She’s a big old hog.
If you are asked by your female partner if you think Lizzo is beautiful, if you follow contemporary mores, whether you think so or not, you had better say ‘yes’ regardless of your actual opinion, lest you be accused of being a racist, fat-phobic, or one of many different epithets du jour.
But if you turn around, and tell your thin-waisted partner that she reminds you of Lizzo, and that she is as beautiful as her, then you better watch out for that roundhouse punch headed for your jaw. Lizzo might be able to sing, but she’s still a big old fat hog. It’s only the pronouncement of it, as well as mapping it to your partner, that threatens your health. I wrote in this piece how the defense of the “fat is beautiful” campaign is actually an embedded genetic failure mechanism that would be used in a society already cursed with an obesity epidemic. But Dr. S. has called it out for what it is — a malignant form of reproductive suppression, in large part embedded in the genes and only emergent in our time.
And why does this matter? The constant, and chronic double binds manufactured by modern Woke culture, and bombarded across civilization now offer an avenue for the cognitive confusion and abuse to create a critical mass of Axis II, Cluster B personality disorders. And these folks then can form up into what I’ve called Vampire Colonies — where the psychopaths overwhelm the majority of society. This has already likely happened in Great Britain. But because they are now all relational disruptors, no societal coherence can be generated. The downstream is something we’re seeing, especially in large metropolitan areas — relational disruption and gaslighting turn into public policy, which then leads to enshrinement of rights of social disruptors and criminals, and collapse. And the terrible thing is that it happens in the context a new, unworkable morality that further leads to conflict, and potentially civil war. Not everyone ends up a vampire. And someone’s neck has to provide the blood.
One of the interesting things about Dr. S’s research is she dug down into the v-Meme perspectives of her research subjects (my words, not hers) and uncovered many women publicly espousing opinions that they did not privately hold, especially when they involved reproduction. A great example would be conservative women publicly stating support for abortion — a classic deception to make liberal women believe they have more allies for their cause, but in reality just sabotaging different v-Meme cohorts through false flag support. If they can get more differentiated cohorts to kill their unborn, then the less children of elites to compete with their own. Similar behavior happens in the public school/private school debate. There is a cohort of people wanting to constrain individual choice in school selection, because they have plenty of money to send their kids to private schools. And the production of those inferior schools mean less competition for their own kids. They already know that public schools suck.
One of the crazy outcomes of all of this chronic promotion of double binds is, as I stated above, the creation of larger cohorts of psychopathic personalities (especially borderline personality disorders,) which then go about creating the various luxury beliefs, described eloquently by Rob Henderson here, and virtue signals necessary to immiserate and create havoc in society. But there are more insidious side effects as well. Psychopaths are far more likely to sexually abuse children. And sexual abuse of children then leads to even more psychopaths.
The collapse that happens in such a society is not easily recoverable. It’s essentially a tribal-level reset. And the problem with that level of reset is a dramatic reduction in population density. Psychopaths simply cannot maintain the information complexity necessary for the people on the planet. We’re already seeing this with the elevation of fraud in the journalism corps, and the spreading of alternative narratives that are very tribal-myth-adoptable. Look at the current Russiagate debacle on the Left, where Hillary Clinton and Adam Schiff spawned a disinformation campaign directed at undermining current President Trump. This piece is being written on August 15, 2025. Stay tuned.
Road Warrior here we come. And we didn’t even need a nuclear holocaust. Just brainworms in enough Affluent White Female Urban Liberals (AWFULs).
Are there paths out? So much of this behavior is emergent, it is very difficult to control. But the path out of this, as I stated in this piece, is upward psychosocial evolution. But it’s going to count on women to lead the way. There must be some sublimation of core drives in the female community involving a reorientation of status regarding nurture, and a diminution of the social control part of the fundamental female dyad of nurture/social control.
Or else we’re on the path to involuntary extinction, based on the bet that not the men, but elite women have created, that once the collapse happens, their genes will be the ones that repopulate the planet. But I would remind the psychopathic utopian women who might read this. If you think that through duplicity, you’re going to somehow avoid the inevitable outcomes of societal collapse, you’re really condemning your daughters to the inevitable fruits of war. There will be men who survive. But most will be killed, and the inevitable downstream outcome, that we see time and again in history is that the fate of the women will be rape and slavery.
My fervent hope is that women in aggregate realize this before it happens. Your genes will not care, nor be able to affect who they are paired with. Because in that phase of history, unlike today, with the sidebars of civilization, you will not be the ones running the show.
Two therapy dogs, Ghillie and Cecilia, getting ready for a child client
One of the most frustrating parts of what I write about is getting people to realize that they don’t know stuff, and the real solution when you don’t know stuff — at least to start — is to realize you don’t know stuff. You can’t effectively harness new modes of understanding until you get to the point where you realize that all the old answers you used to think might explain stuff just aren’t going to cut the mustard. Too many contradictions, and such, means you have to accept your ignorance and move on. It is only then that enlightenment can occur.
This is hardly a new idea, and the Zen masters — my favorite go-tos — were big on this. One of my favorite stories from Paul Reps’ collection, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, is below, and deals directly with my line of employment.
Once, a university professor went to visit a well-respected Zen Master to learn about Zen. The Master first invited him to sit for a cup of tea. The professor sat down and started talking about Zen. The Master quietly prepared and poured the tea. When the tea was filled to the cup’s brim, he kept pouring. The professor watched the overflowing cup until he could no longer restrain himself. “It’s full! No more will go in!” blurted the professor. “The same with your mind. How can I teach you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
But changing adapted mental models is hard. Why, for example, would you bother to learn what I talk about on this blog? You really have to be tortured by your own confusion to sit down and spend the time to instantiate all this stuff. And you’re likely not going to get much community support dwelling on what some rando on the Internet says might change your life. (That Rando would be me, of course.)
In short, you have to possess the developed ability of metacognition — knowing what you don’t know, and having a sense that there is stuff out there that you’re not even aware of.
Why is this so challenging? As I said in this piece, once you open your mind to the notion that maybe the truth is really shared information that different, active sentient agents use for inter-agent coordination (read the piece for details — it’s a little complicated) you realize that if you adopt a different mental model than your friends, you risk alienation and loneliness from your cohort group. And humans no likey that kind of thing, at all. Being alone means that tigers are gonna eat ya. And if you think you’re going to retreat from some likely 10M years of evolution just to figure out how to help pilot our society out of its current mess, I’ve got news for you.
Metacognition — or admitting that you don’t know — in a group is going to have also other active agents rush in to fill you up with their views, which probably aren’t any better, and likely worse than your own. It’s how we get those mass psychoses we’ve got going. And the more externally defined/emotionally available you are to what others think, it’s going to get ugly fast. Corrections in this kind of peer pressure are long-term. People just don’t want to hear your bullshit confusion.
Some things we don’t know are also profoundly comforting in not knowing, especially if you already have a narrative figured out that makes sense with the surrounding sensory inputs in your environment. I used to be a big Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) advocate. But as time went by, and, well, the seas didn’t swallow New York City, I became more and more of a skeptic. And then when people in the IPCC threatened something I happen to love very much — in this case, vast swaths of native forest, which at least some of them wanted to cut down to make the planet more shiny (that’s the albedo thing) I woke up. There are more things in heaven and Earth than my philosophy can know, Horatio.
And then I continued my journey with meeting people like Judy Curry, the former chair of atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech, and someone that had made the jump herself a couple of decades ago. Judy’s book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk, is dense — but a classic. Only someone like Judy could go through the probabilistic analyses of what actually is going to happen in the climate space, as a risk management and probability expert. It was one piece in the puzzle that convinced me we actually have a memetic problem with climate science — not so much a scientific one. Status elevation in the field was (and still is) tied to how catastrophic the narrative one creates, instead of anything resembling a grounded reality. Those louder voices have seized the megaphone, and they’re screaming. And if you don’t fall in line, it’s only tigers for you.
And what do those loud voices do? That’s where my expertise kicks in. Some very famous loud voices in the climate science community are also connected in a very closed-loop feedback modality to the insurance industry. If they’re all saying we’re gonna wash away in the next big storm, someone has to sell us insurance so we can rebuild back in the same place. That’s what insurance is all about. And that means they have to raise their rates, because business is business, don’tchaknow? Or the government has to cover the house. Or something. Short answer — the real problem is brain worms in the scientific climate community.
So to understand all of how this might be connected, you gotta start admitting you don’t know stuff, and looking for other signals that people are lying to you. The biggest would be insurance company profits. Which is downright metacognitive-y. Because now people are paying increased premiums for things that didn’t happen. And our news media stream is not about reporting things that didn’t happen. You didn’t read a piece recently “China didn’t invade Mongolia this week,” because that wouldn’t have much signal value. Or emotional value either.
But just because I wasn’t aware of insurance profits, didn’t mean that the signal wasn’t there. That’s the whole Dark Matter part of metacognition. Dark Matter is the stuff in the universe that doesn’t reflect light, but it’s still there tugging on all sorts of other stuff through gravity. Considering that it makes up 85% of the matter in the universe, though, you can’t just ignore it. And that’s what is happening in the memetic-sphere with our thoughts. Metacognition is accepting that it really does exist, and then starting the process of adjusting our worldview to understand it.
My friend, and atmospheric scientist at UC-Davis Joe Biello sent me this picture. Once you understand where that Dark Matter is, it’s not surprising that the picture it gives of what’s going on starts becoming more coherent, or in the colloquial, making more sense. Here’s insurance industry profits.
I used to use the signal that the insurance industry was raising their rates as proof that AGW was real. But it turns out not so much. It turns out the same people spreading the AGW hysteria are also looped into the money-making machine. And it’s not that some level of GW is happening (and some is caused by humans) it’s that the hysteria signal prevents more reasoned debates from occurring on what actual solutions might be. Or on what scale we should respond. I’m extremely pro-environment (spent my entire life working on various issues) and totally believe humans can fuck up stuff locally, as well as regionally. Big time. Anyone can see a clearcut. Or an urban heat island. But actually grounding yourself to changes in the global system needs lots more research.
Which we should be doing. But when the hysteria meter is off the charts, instead of understanding how our natural systems, which are obviously complex, modulate the climate, through vegetation, circulation and growth (see my buddies Anastassia’s and Andrei’s work on the biotic pump) we end up with people demanding we turn Siberia into a parking lot. We still don’t know exactly how all this works. But we won’t even study it if all the money is diverted into computer time and large models. It’s like sticking our fingers in our ears and saying “Nyah nyah nyah!” Not very metacognitive-y. Nor wise.
It’s no surprise that human brains work like this. Yeah, I like my work on knowledge complexity. But you’ll also find me recognizing Michael L. Commons’ work on hierarchical complexity as well. Not quite as system-y as mine is but spot on as far as understanding what humans are capable of knowing. And here’s the key. One of the hardest things for humans to process is cross-paradigmatic complexity. In our example case here, the cross-paradigmatic complexity is how AGW research feeds into insurance industry profits. There are at least three jumps across physical to social systems that reveal the relative truth of a lot of this stuff. Most human brains no likey. And even if your brain DOES like it, you’re likely to be missing something. I know I certainly was. The easiest immediate proof that storm intensity and frequency are NOT increasing is found in insurance industry profits. Because if it actually was, you better believe the insurance industry would be howling more than they already are. And there’s also ancillary cause-and-effect (like building more cheap houses in places like Florida) that are also potentially causal in insurance industry profits going down, if there actually were a hurricane. It’s all part of the metacognitive puzzle — not just looking at the connections, but also looking at how, and which are the connections that matter.
This kind of analysis (or really, meta-analysis) can leap all over the map. I’ve been going back-and-forth on the risks of AI tech, for example. And one ALWAYS ends up with the “correlation is not causation” tropes, like increasing ice cream prices are tied to tiger predation, or some such icks. You can look those up yourself.
If there is any answer to all this, it is awareness and your agency. So walk around and think about stuff you really don’t know much about. And then investigate. The worst thing that can happen is you become a more interesting cocktail party guest. Even if no one wants to invite you.
P.S. Judy’s latest contribution to the DOE’s climate report is here. They did a great job in pulling apart a very confounded body of work that is mostly nonsensical. You’ll hear the usual hue and cry about the oil industry blah blah blah, but I really encourage you to read it. It’s good mental exercise.
One of the most difficult concepts for people to internalize that I write about is the notion of Independently Generated, Data-Driven relationships vs. Externally Defined, Belief-based relationships. These two archetypes form the core of all human relational systems and social structures, and if you believe me, are the things that create the baseline of our cognitive neural systems. The first is based on agency-driven, data-based empathy (think in terms of simplification as reading the complex mix of verbal and non-verbal communication for building gradated trust.) The second is belief-based, and created outside the individual by the larger social structure in play. These require no agency — the fact that I’m a professor, for example, is defined by my university. Whether you think I’m a nice guy or not, however, is dependent on your own judgment.
The short version is that these belief-based relationships map to the same part of the brain as limbic/emotional states. As such, they’re coupled to very short timescales, as well as immediate reactivity to information. Very different than an independently generated relationship, that depends on interaction, autobiographical narratives, and far more complex and complicated processing in the pre-frontal cortex. Your conscious mind is a powerful thing. But it takes more time and energy.
I’ve often been asked if there’s any set of experiments I could do to validate my various theories, other than trust in my skills of observation. I always laugh, and say “well, if you gave me $10M I could.” I’d have to hire real people in psychometrics, and sort through all of it.
But then this meme started making the rounds of the Internet. And maybe, just maybe, it might not be so impossible. I’m talking about the figure below.
Paper in Nature Communications, Waytz, Iyer, Young and Haidt (Sept. 2019)
My primary critique with Haidt’s work is that he basically just makes up categories with no physical basis, that sound good, and this is no different. But he also is great at intuitive guesses, so at the same time, I do recommend reading him.
What this graph shows is the differentiation between how conservatives and liberals view moral obligation. Conservatives, on average, start closer to home, with more weight placed on people that they know, and then with concern dying out as distance in time and space increases. Liberals are the exact opposite. People adjacent to them accrue no credit for distance minimized, with concerns being projected on people further away, or even things that are often deeply unknowable.
What these folks don’t posit (mostly because they’re academics, and are invested in a low empathy environment, which then conditions their own bias) is that this also clearly demonstrates the potential morality that springs from a combination of independent, empathetic connection, as well as validity grounding — the ability to believe something because you witness it with your own senses. These two things are necessarily confounded (the experiment wasn’t set up to separate them) but you can still see how this plays out.
Short version — some majority of conservatives value a personally collected stream of information more than they do other sources, or experts and their stories. With the exact opposite being true for liberals/progressives. And this creates a profound neural gap between how the two will sort into social structures. Because of this relational divide, conservatives are far more likely to be communitarians than liberals. And liberals are far more likely to sort into elite-governed hierarchies, and be status conscious. You show your level of cool to your liberal pals by being concerned about the politics in West Papua, which you can never really hope to affect. And you can also appreciate how missionaries tend to be conservative. You want people to be saved? You travel and tell them about Jesus.
One can also see how this develops low- and high-responsibility mindsets. You can care about the entire world, but the reality is there’s not much effect you can have on the entire planet. But you can impress others with your virtue, which will then elevate your status in your social hierarchy. Contrast to the conservative viewpoint — you can affect your local environment, let’s say by planting a tree in your downtown, and while the global effect of that action is also unknowable, you can be responsible, and hold yourself accountable for that particular action. You can check on how the tree grows — an exercise in validity grounding –– and then, importantly change your behavior to improve the tree’s thriving. And all the time, you’re really cultivating how your brain processes information.
Since the election of Donald Trump, I’ve had to deal with a spate of attacks and abandonment from many of my liberal friends. This is not pleasant — even for me. Any straying from more and more extreme party orthodoxy means condemnation and alienation. I have picked up some more conservative friends along the way, and honestly enjoyed the development of some very honest and refreshing relationships, often hooked to the social media app X/Twitter. For me at least, these are data-driven — I ‘tweet’ and then people follow me for my ideas. I’m fully aware there is group aggregation in all of this. But as an original content creator, it’s been very refreshing.
The downstream cascade of the isolation the liberal community is actually promulgating is not going to be pretty – for them. Based on purity tests and adherence to orthodoxy, it is inherently relationally disruptive, and as such, prone to being kidnapped by psychopaths, who are far better liars than most of my friends trapped in progressive claques. Because it’s tied to our limbic centers, more people are likely to make snap decisions about which friends to keep or reject. I’ve certainly seen this on Facebook. And worse — if you’re prone to splitting, it ain’t gonna get better.
It’s also disorienting for those same progressives. As more fantastic crimes get dreamt up, the more the liberal mind loses its grip on a more adjacent reality, and the more we see projection of this mindset on conservatives. And that adjacent reality is the thing that creates the world we navigate.
As I’ve noted before, psychopaths always make a big splash up front. But over time, the system manages to find a way to isolate its relational vampires.
Yosemite North Country, headwaters of the Tuolumne River
Immigration has turned into one of the most controversial issues of our day. Why? Because we are in the days of what I would call the Great Validity Grounding — where our elites have carried population manipulation through propaganda to such a level, there is no way we can swallow the various fictions and not get hit over the head by reality.
And immigration is far from the only issue. We are told that boys are girls, and there is no harm in pumping teenagers full of cross-sex hormones. We are told that our very agencies responsible for subversive activity around the world are only the positive narcissistic storefronts for saving lives around the globe. That Americans really aren’t owed any reasonable egalitarian trade policies. That we should be involved in endless, historic wars around the world. The list goes on and on.
Most Americans want to retreat from all this — and have. Being hyper-informed (I am the worst when it comes to digesting the constant stream of news out of the Internet and social media) AND being a teacher who actually engages my students — I sit with them and nonjudgmentally ask them what they know — it is stunning how little most of them are aware of what is going on, nor how they are being manipulated 24/7. But the crunch is coming for the population, and certainly no one has championed the re-grounding effort in common-sense reality than Donald Trump. I’ve been very critical of Trump in the past. But as I wrote in a recent piece, maybe we needed an inveterate narcissist to play-act the role of national father to shake us out of our shared cognitive delusion.
When it comes to immigration, I am profoundly against illegal immigration of any sort. What happened during the Biden administration was an appalling betrayal of the national interest. And the accounting of the damage is yet to be reckoned with. And assembling coherent narratives of that damage is nearly impossible – because by and large, the elites in our society have benefited. And our press will simply not report in any coherent manner on the actual effects of the past 20M (or more) illegal immigrants coming into our country in the past four years.
But such a tidal wave of humanity had to have mechanisms that supported it. That led to growth of large-scale Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the gaslighting machinations to hide from and defraud the American people, who paid for all of it. But there is more — if you need more proof of the size of the effort, go to Youtube and search for “migrants – Darien Gap”. You’ll see the encampments set up in Colombia — often nation- or language-specific that shepherded the mass of humanity (mostly 20-30 something males) up through some of the most remote jungle on the planet, and onto buses and trains into the United States. Bret Weinstein on Tucker Carlson gives insights on the darker part of all this — Chinese migration into the US.
The other dark side of all this is that Sinaloan gangs from Mexico form a huge part of the infrastructure for getting illegal migrants from around the globe into the U.S. There are no clear numbers on the money involved with the cartels, but it is clear that it ranges in the tens of billions, to potentially hundreds of billions of dollars. The idea that peasants or lower caste individuals from African countries could figure out how to get to Ecuador or Colombia and then traverse the Darien Gap, purely on their own gumption, is laughably ridiculous. The cartels get the cash, and then provide the services. And any deficits are made up in the sex slave trade.
Further, the travesty of the border then fuels huge monetary reserves for those same cartels to buy politicians on the border, as well as along the route. If you expect these same cartels, with their violent economic morality to suddenly acquiesce to the federal government shutting down a primary revenue stream, you are deluded.
But that is not the main point of this piece. My experience is primarily with the connected consequences of our legal immigration policy — which involves the evolution and development of our technical workforce. That is something we must address as well, because how we approach this already has, and will continue to dictate our own economic composition of our own country.
To start, I think it’s important to remember that there are phases behind any social policy. While social policy is always going to be heavily biased towards elite interests (Peter Turchin in his book, End Times, notes that there’s basically no period in a society’s life where this ISN’T true) that doesn’t mean that every policy propagated will necessarily damage those not high-status. Policies, however, run their course, and inevitably, as they get hacked and manipulated by sophisticated individuals, who have some psychopathic members as part of their cohort, must be revisited before the disparate impact becomes so damaging they threaten the fabric of that same society.
Let’s get to the basics. Folks have been gaslit for so long on this issue they deny basic realities.
1. Increased competition drives down wages at the bottom of the wage scale.
2. Same makes housing more unaffordable for poor folks.
3. Labor surpluses leave little incentive for politicians to fix deficits in training and education for people on the lower part of the wage scale.
4. H1B visas gut the demand drivers for improving technical education for high school and undergraduate students.
5. Lack of a society that generates good jobs mean more “culture of poverty” problems for society, as poverty and single-parent homelessness drive crime rates and violence.
What one realizes is that these policies directly fuel the Wealth Pump — the social mechanisms that Turchin describes that moves money from the lower classes into the upper classes. This then exacerbates the income gap problem the country has been experiencing since the early ’70s. Which then drives an empathy gap, as the country moves away from egalitarian, high social contact lifestyles that might lead to emergent levels of compassion, as well as compensatory policies that actually make sense.
But what is NOT discussed is that immigration also serves as a metacognitive drag. I’m an engineering professor, and one of the drumbeats in the background of my entire career has been the need to educate more engineers. Or recruit them. Or whatever.
But around 1996, I noticed a new phenomenon. Engineering students, who a priori had typically received two offers at graduation, suddenly only were receiving one. And salaries had also gotten stuck. Neither of these phenomena indicate a starving job market. In fact, the opposite. And this has not changed. In fact, what HAS happened is there have been an increase required in experience for someone to get a job as an engineer. 30 years ago, maybe 50% of all students had an internship, which then did facilitate them getting a job. Now, my guess is that 90% of students have internships. And jobs are not really available for students who have below a 3.0/4.0 GPA. We in the university have compensated for these pressures as far as facilitating some of these requirements. But the pressure on the universities themselves to improve their own curricula has been non-existent. Instead, universities, contaminated by status-seeking behaviors, have doubled down on “research productivity.” Most research produced by universities is garbage — but then again, most new thought is garbage. You’d never know from watching how universities sell themselves, though. And it’s also true you have to have some area of inquiry for faculty to pursue — especially in rapidly changing fields like engineering. Without it, it is far too easy for faculty to stagnate. But, as with all things, there are limits. And universities, with their meta-linear metrics, fuel nonsensical creep of numbers rather than looking at actual advancement.
Like it or not, one starts to realize the key lever to forcing this society to fix its problems is to radically cut back on the number of H1-B visas currently issued. Then elites will have to start applying pressure to political systems to fix the educational system. Yes — there will be some pressure to offshore some of the work. But that is not without its costs. And I’d argue it would be far easier to just to fix our own educational systems.
Reproduction of a Side Table designed by Tage Frid – Walnut
It’s been over a week since the B-2 strike force, armed with GBU-57 “bunker buster” bombs, took off from Whiteman AFB, flying some crazy mileage to and from sites in Iran (Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan) and dropping some specified load literally down the ventilation shafts of the Fordow site, to devastate the caverns where Iran had set up their centrifuge cascades. Uranium starts out as a gas, and then is spun in these centrifuges, each stage concentrating a little more, until sufficiently dense fissile material is collected.
From a memetic perspective, building any nuclear weapon requires a society of sufficient complexity, so that the parts of each step along the way can be coordinated and formed into a bomb. As I’ve said earlier, everyone pretty much KNOWS how to do it. But it’s kind of like watching a high diver pulling off two flips off the high board. You KNOW how to do it. But actually doing it ain’t so simple.
Less than 24 hours after the strike, a Defense Intelligence Agency report, ostensibly of “low confidence” was leaked to the likes of CNN and MSNBC, saying the strikes had not been successful, and that Iran’s nuclear program had only been set back “a couple of weeks” or some such icks. I thought that was patently ridiculous — I’ve worked as a military-adjacent rocket scientist my entire career, as well as supervising numerous projects in the nuclear nonproliferation space. The Air Force had dedicated a single individual to deeply understanding and planning this raid for FIFTEEN years, according to JCS Chair, General Dan Caine, when then led to the development of the GBU-57. That’s some crazy information sophistication right there.
But at the time of the raid, the point was straightforward — at that time, there was no way anyone could believe that any human could even know what happened to Fordow. At least any normal human. Fordow was a site buried under 300′ of mountain. Yet journalists like Jake Tapper jumped on the narrative that the strikes had failed. When, after some time had passed, it was obvious that there was a.) no way Iran was restarting its nuclear program any time soon, and b.) the strikes had been a devastating success, clowns like Tapper decried attacks on their reputation, as well as their obvious compromise of the intelligence apparatus of the country that hosts them.
Tapper had, however, played his important role in The Matrix — as one of the key gaslighters in the media apparatus. He had cast some doubt (however short-lived) on Trump’s declaration of victory, accompanied of course by the usual Trump bloviating. Trump is far from perfect, and boy he do go on. Those of us that have watched the gaslighting trajectory of what Mike Benz calls “The Blob” weren’t surprised by any of it. But there, for a brief time, the MSM had managed to spin up, along with the Blob-Congressional-Industrial Complex, the idea that the US Air Force, as hegemonic a force as has EVER existed on the planet, could once again not get anything done.
I’ve confessed in the past that I’m a Tolkien fan. And if there’s two quotes that roll through my brain on a regular basis, both are from the Lord of the Rings – notably, The Two Towers. The first is by Eomer, Lord of the Mark – “Those who do not lie are not easily deceived,” and the second by the traitor to Theoden, the King of Rohan, Grima Wormtongue, upon being daylighted on his deception, uses rules of engagement to avoid a dark fate “You have no right to assail me. I have not drawn sword nor threatened you.” Classic manipulation of civilization to protect obvious treachery. Those Eomer-devotees were not fooled, even if we didn’t know the answer.
What Tapper and others were doing were feeding into the chronic gaslighting narrative that the American public has largely been fed since the mid-90s. It is relatively nonpartisan (think Clinton’s impeachment trial as a start) as well as Bush’s Iraq War (GWOT) as well as Obama’s continued prosecution of it through Libya, as well as Afghanistan. It’s moved to high dudgeon with the Democrats, and the insidious development of the NGO-Industrial Complex, that’s formed so many channels for money to flow out of the Treasury, to all sorts of congress-lizards’ pet causes and spouses. Most of it has been squandered in the name of whatever cause-du-jour sounds the most virtuous for elites. But the reality is that the money hits hard in the travel budgets of the well-connected, as well as the academic institutions that prop up the philosophical component of the current elites, that is so important in forming rationalizations that confuse.
Which is the point. The definition of gaslighting, a term popularized from the movie ‘Gaslight’ with the immortal Ingrid Bergman, is a chronic and repetitive manipulation of information that the target experiences, with the intent of making them doubt all their own senses. Which then, deprives the victim of actually figuring out what the truth is on their own. It’s intended as a spatial/temporal agency destroyer, and boy howdy — it can work.
Gaslighting expands in the space of a society being overwhelmed by increasing complexity. People go looking for easier, simpler explanations of phenomena, often with high-level emotional resonance, which makes the various stories easier to remember. Psychopaths figure this out, and are more than happy to create these stories, almost always designed to strike fear in the target audience, with the intent of immobilization of the populace. You get to the point where you have no real idea what’s going on. So when something happens that you should know something about, you give up early. This drives relational disruption as well as the bonding that can happen over actual truth, between disparates parts of the population. The truth might be out there, folks might be able to agree on what that is, and form synergistic perspectives from different sides of the political spectrum. But we just can’t. We’re already been taught some version of learned helplessness.
And what THAT does is drive some form of decentralization, or its darker form, disintegration of societies. Things that OUGHT to be knowable suddenly are not. And then the folks making bank exactly from that confusion rush in to vacuum up the money feeds from the downed carcass. If a pack of hyenas comes to mind around a hapless giraffe, you’re not far off.
And so it is with Trump’s bombing of the Iran nuclear sites. One of the persistent myths in the US is that our armed forces are somehow incompetent, and cannot do their job. The reality is so strikingly different from this. In all cases, all branches of the military are wildly effective at blowing stuff up, everyone else literally runs for cover when they hear we’re going to show up. We consistently wiped the map of any of our enemies in ANY of our past conflicts. Even in ostensible debacles, like the Blackhawk Down incident in Mogadishu (I had a friend at that shit show) where 15 Army Rangers got killed, we killed over 1500 Somalis. And that was in the presence of Somali children running supplies for the warlords.
But tagged to that obvious first-wave success has also been myths — and they ARE myths — about our ostensible obligations in enforcing the American Empire. Colin Powell, former Secretary of State, as an inveterate liar as ever disgraced the State Department, said “you break it, you own it.” Of course, this is not true — we might have bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq because of that philosophy, but we sure as hell didn’t care about Libya when we whacked Qaddafi. Libya now sits, a profound wreck of a society, with open air slave markets. The real point of the gaslighting was to prime the pump for both military contractors and NGOs to make a shit-ton of money. So we had to manufacture gaslighting myths to explain our presence in those countries, so that our winners, consisting mostly of elite East Coast families, could continue to make bank from the public trough.
When you assign someone to a 15 year tenure to blow up one place on the map, you’re doubling down on sophistication to fix your foreign policy problems. And in the case of Iran, Trump, wielding his own sword to cut the Gordian Knot of gaslighting around the use of military power, did that. I have no doubt, just looking at the subsidence patterns around Fordow, that the ceiling literally came crashing down. And Trump did NOT pay attention to the Collapse Mavens, like CBS’ Margaret Brennan, whom Secretary of State Marco Rubio demolished in an interview last week. It’s profound de-gaslighting when someone like Rubio basically said “these people have been obviously making a bomb, and we didn’t listen to all you idiots that attempted some re-interpretation of the fact that they had built this huge underground facility to make a bomb.” If Brennan’s side of the argument can’t be perceived as a Collapse Narrative, well you, dear reader, are not going to have your mind changed by a piece on a relatively obscure blog.
And, especially with regards to military power, we’ve ALWAYS totally dominated, for lots of reasons that I’m not going to go in here. Our military is powerfully sophisticated — to the point where the Collapse Champions have gone after it to make it less so. Obvious things, like “trans women in the military” or even deployment of women to forward zones (the pregnancy rate goes through the roof when it looks like real conflict is brewing, regardless of the actual valor of some women (some of whom have been my students) ) are attempted by the gaslighters to be turned into conflict-laden narratives, intended to divide.
I’ve mentioned Anand Gopal’s fantastic book before, No Good Men Among the Living, about our war with the Taliban. Militarily, we established country-wide superiority in almost no time at all, spunky mujahedin myths be damned. But we couldn’t hold it, because the gaslighting contingent, interested in turning our foreign wars into a money printing machine, didn’t define a military goal and then get out. When the Taliban was first subjected to F-18 strikes from carriers, it blew their mind — a literal alien force showed up and annihilated any resistance.
But where the lack of clear goals came in was in our lack of understanding of societal psycho-social development. Afghanistan could only be moved so far — especially in any kind of meaningful progression. And democracy was not going to be the end state. What that meant was that we would need to decide if we could do what the psychosocial DNA of that society, with its enslavement and chronic rape of women, men and animals, could be reformed. That would require a level of murder and assassination we are simply incapable of providing from our advanced civilization. And putting military and CIA operatives in place was not going to change that. It was the toxic sludge produced in the minds of our history and sociology profs that condemned us as much as the desire for money laundering from DynCorp and Halliburton, as well as the insane USAID network and plans to help Afghans increase the opium trade in the name of rural development. Gopal’s book details how the tribal leaders, realizing our own military leaders, with THEIR own limited psychosocial development, could be manipulated in taking out each others’ enemies using our military, which they had accurately assessed as being so overwhelming superior to their own. Societal evolution was not required.
And similarly in Iraq. While the various factotums were running around championing turning Iraq, a nation held together for reasons by Saddam Hussein’s barbaric form of Tikriti justice, the fact that Iraq as well was no monolithic mass of body politic (similar to what the gaslighters are projecting now on Iran, though Iran’s is a few evolutionary clicks ahead of Iraq) also escaped our analysts’ projections. Military strikes are one thing — and relatively sterile. But War itself (with a big W) always entails the same things, and Americans historically don’t have the stomach for it. War involves killing all the men, and raping all the women. It’s the way the game is played, deep in the Tribal/Authoritarian v-Memes. And if you can’t play that game, you better not show up with your various virtues. And the real reason your ostensibly virtuous NGO is there is to rip off the pig.
The real effect of Trump in the mind of the American people is he is ripping off the mask of the psychopathic gaslighters, that have sold us a myth of civilization in places that aren’t capable of sustaining a lot of it. Men can be women? Trump rips off the mask. Boys wearing lipstick and pretending to be girls aren’t destabilizing the level playing field of high school sports? That scab is coming off. USAID is really about curing AIDS around the world? That one’s gonna hurt.
And even further into our institutions. My pal, Jay Bhattacharya, at NIH, is also doing yeoman’s work in the de-gaslighting of the American populace. AIDS vaccine research that’s going on for 40 years, with no meaningful advance — that one’s gonna go. As well as a host of other emotional triggers that the old gaslighting elites have been using to great effect, to keep the money flowing into their various institutions. Look at the gaslighting virtue argument used FOR Gain-of-Function viral research. Mind-boggling that there’s even a discussion.
But don’t count on the old gaslighters to go without a fight. The recent donnybrook over illegal immigration is a great example of how the elites making the bank have their own Praetorian Guard of True Believers, holding forth on everything from “dads who are human traffickers are dads first” to “who will scrub my toilet at a rate under minimum wage?” The current 14th Amendment Birthright Citizenship kerfuffle is an amazing example of this. The 14th Amendment was passed to insure justice and citizenship for slaves at the end of the Civil War. Using it to argue for anchor babies, as well as birth tourism from China, in order to make sure their one precious baby can get into the UC System requires a different level of gaslighting. Yet, in this moment of time, it’s the Ds screaming about the unconstitutionality of Trump’s EO on this issue. And like all good gaslighters, they’re doing it with a straight face. With tears. Never underestimate the power of women crying. It’s an old trick.
Of course, America will remain confused for a while. Any detox process takes time. And the gaslighters, while fading, aren’t gonna stop any time soon. We didn’t get into this rut overnight, and we’re not going to climb out overnight. The irony that it took Trump, a pathological narcissist, to start the unraveling of the Great Gaslit Empire (backed with data from Elon) isn’t lost on me. But when your civilization is on the brink, your heroes you get are the ones you get.
And as for Fordow — that place went boom. Boy howdy.
P.S. A piece for another time — but how many of our institutions can we hope to save, considering how deeply they’re invested in gaslighting? Dunno. Some have completely turned into what I call Vampire Colonies. Where the psychopaths have functionally taken over. Not much hope for them.
It's About Empathy - Connection Ties Us Together 